The Curse Of Data Decay On Sales Prospecting by Denave
Sales Teams and the Remedy

Data decay is a natural phenomenon. A B2B database is a dynamic component and comes with an expiration date if you leave it alone for too long.

Data decay is a natural phenomenon. A B2B database is a dynamic component and comes with an expiration date if you leave it alone for too long. Data decay can be defined as the corrosion of the quality of B2B databases because people change jobs or titles, companies shut down, or mergers occur. And since this data is the bread and butter of your sales and marketing campaigns, the price tag of its decay can cost you dearly.

B2B businesses rely on an accurate corporate database, from phone numbers, email addresses, and tech stacks to company locations, for the success of their sales and marketing campaigns. The average monthly B2B contact data decays at 2.1%, thus translating into an annual rate of 22.5%. Meanwhile, an overwhelming number of B2B organizations continue to be oblivious to the cost of data decay. The situation is alarming and requires a timely intervention by the companies to refresh their corporate databases and maintain their sanctity.

Logical Data Decay: The Curse of Time

Logical data decay happens when the insights stored in your corporate database become obsolete due to the time-sensitiveness of the data. As people switch jobs, change their numbers, and update their email addresses, gaps arise in the databases and need immediate correction to keep them relevant.

While companies can easily buy database before a critical sales or marketing campaign, updating and enriching the existing databases can be more economical. The 1-10-100 rule explicitly states that the cost of prevention of data decay is $1, the cost of correction is $10, and the cost of leaving data unattended is $100.

The cost to the sales and marketing teams

Data decay causes a detrimental impact on sales and marketing teams. It leads to poorly targeted customer outreach campaigns- you miss out on revenue opportunities, fail to improve the customer experience and increase the likelihood of prospects spamming your domain.

Corrosion of the sales pipeline
When the data stored in your CRM or sales funnel decays, it saps the ability of your sales teams to convert leads. Calling on dead phone numbers or shooting emails to the wrong prospects results in wasted efforts. Furthermore, incorrect technographic and firmographic information can result in abrasive customer interactions, making your sales pitch less convincing and factually incorrect. All these factors deteriorate the overall value of your sales pipeline, translating into missed opportunities.

Declining sales performance & loss in revenue
When the sales pipeline is filled with outdated and incorrect prospect information, your sales teams waste considerable time in fixing those lead entries. This shifts their focus away from customer outreach and falls short of their conversion quotas.

Stale data drives sales reps' energy and time on chasing bad leads and contacting dead phone numbers, forcing an overall decline in sales performance and a major drop in revenue. It affects your sales team's ability to target the decision-makers in key accounts.

Diminished marketing returns 
Driving campaigns like email marketing and account-based marketing based on decayed data can put your brand name at risk. You could end up sending emails to the spam folder of an incorrect recipient, hurting your domain reputation and increasing your email churn rate. A compromised domain reputation is challenging to fix and also depletes your marketing dollars.

Solutions to prevent and fix data decay

So far, we have seen the challenges that data decay poses for your sales and marketing efforts. But what's the solution? One immediate answer is to prevent data decay at the onset using data enrichment, whitespace discovery, and continuous data cleaning services.

When you factor in the absolute volume and variety of data enterprises come across daily, you realize that the modern B2B data is nothing like the simple firmographics of yesteryear. Modern sales and marketing engines are reliant heavily on their ability to derive insights from databases and then act on that information in innovative ways.

With a clean, accurate B2B database, you ensure that you consistently reach out to the right people with finer details to personalize the conversation. Enterprises can either set up an internal data hygiene program or embrace the services of a B2B database provider to combat data decay. Let's look at some of the ways to keep your B2B database clean, updated, and relevant:

Data Cleansing: Enterprises should continuously clean their databases to remove duplicate, incorrect, and stale data from their CRMs and other data repository. A well-maintained B2B database helps target the right buyers at the right time with personalized messaging.

Data Enrichment: Using automated enrichment strategies, you can make your data ready for action with updated and valid information fields. A data enrichment strategy regularly scours your database to identify old data sets like email addresses, direct dials, and funding rounds and refresh them with updated ones. This keeps sales and marketing teams updated with the changes in their prospect data and better target extracts finer details for enhanced targeting.

Whitespace Discovery: This is the process of digging through the B2B database to uncover new unmet opportunities for cross-selling/upselling. Whitespace is fundamentally a gap that businesses can identify and use to hyper-personalize their campaigns. It helps you discover hidden information fields, such as buyer's intent, niche insights like tax filing status, etc., to keep the database evergreen. Whitespace discovery, as an internal engine, can be costly, and hence businesses must leverage a proven B2B database provider to manage their database effectively for higher ROI.

How Denave helps overcome data decay?

With around 50% of your database going stale every year, it is critical to implement a robust data management system. Amidst all the changes at the account and the individual level, Denave will help you back up your data and keep it updated through a host of data maintenance services.

Your database is the key growth driver, and ignoring it has the potential to impact your business goals and bleed revenue. You need a correct strategy and a partnership with the best B2B database provider to keep your database updated.